


The Home for Wayward Elves

by lightgetsin



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-23
Updated: 2003-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:46:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione cleans house and tries her hand at rehabilitation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Home for Wayward Elves

Hermione was on her knees in the middle of the foyer, soapy sponge in one hand, stiff-bristled brush in the other, when she heard him on the stairs. She thought for a moment it was Harry, and a reflexive smile had already formed by the time she looked up.

“Did we lose our wand?” Malfoy—no, Draco, Hermione reminded herself firmly--asked with an amused tilt of the head. He was halfway down the sweeping arc of the main stairs, and Hermione felt very small, almost bug-like crouched below him.

“I’m being an example,” she said, sitting back on her heels and pushing her hair self-consciously out of her face. Then she winced, sure she had just smeared soap or dirt or something worse across her cheek. Malfoy—Draco was a tall, proud figure all in black, his hair catching the final rays of the setting sun through the arching, ornate windows over the front doors. Should clean those, Hermione thought, glancing back at them.

“Ah.” Malfoy came the rest of the way down the stairs. He stopped at their foot, and he should have been dwarfed by their sweep behind him, by the high, carved arch into the formal drawing room to his left, by the entirety of the foyer. But somehow he wasn’t, and Hermione gritted her teeth in sudden irritation. There must be a spell, she told herself a bit peevishly. A spell on the house never to make a Malfoy look anything less than he ought. She wouldn’t put it past Lucius Malfoy or any of his ancestors to do such a thing to their monolith of a home.

Draco made a show of peering about the foyer, his every move a burlesque of curiosity and interest. “And where are the young revolutionaries?” he asked, peering into the archway.

“They ran when they heard you coming,” Hermione said. It might be true, she told herself. It was also possible, of course, that she had been ostentatiously at work, grubby and sweaty and aching, for nearly four hours and all she’d accomplished was getting some of the dirt out of the intricately tiled mosaic floor. She hadn’t heard so much as a squeak of distress, and no elves had come to entreat her not to work, to tell her they could do anything she liked for her with magic or their bare hands if that was how she wanted it. Dobby had said he would try to get some of them to come and watch, but perhaps they’d wised up to her latest strategy and refused.

“Mmm,” Draco said with obvious relish. “The sound of house elf terror in the evening.”

Hermione bristled. “They wouldn’t be so afraid if they hadn’t been grossly mistreated and exploited by generations of—“

“Yes, yes,” Draco waved a dismissive hand. “I’ve heard the speech before, thank you Granger.”

Hermione bit her tongue to control something silly like suggesting that if he couldn’t say anything nice he shouldn’t say anything at all. He would just mock her for it, and she didn’t need to give him more ammunition than he already got simply by her existence.

“Where’s Potter, then?” he asked suddenly, stepping away from the stairs and strolling across the foyer.

“Upstairs,” Hermione said. “He had some correspondence and things to take care of.” An unbidden, unstoppable smile curved her lips. It was unspeakably good to know he was in the house, even if he were still working. She felt like she never saw him sometimes, especially since they’d moved in here. If she didn’t know better, and she wasn’t sure she did, she’d think he was working harder than normal to keep out of the house. But he’d promised her to stay home this weekend, to forget the Ministry and Hogwarts and everything else, and he was sticking to it in his own way.

“Sorry to have missed him,” Draco said in a tone that made it very clear he meant entirely the opposite. “We see so little of each other as it is.”

Hermione snorted under her breath. She could almost say he avoided them. Neither she nor Harry had gotten even a single glimpse of him in the past week, at least. But then again, Malfoy Manor was large enough for that to be coincidental, and Draco did keep rooms in an entirely different wing from theirs. It was, like everything else about Draco and this situation, utterly infuriating. She could never be sure.

“We don’t see much of you,” she said, even though she wanted to stand up and demand once and for all why they were here, why he had made that strange, almost casual offer of his home and property for their use.

Draco shrugged. “I don’t share well,” he said, almost absently. Hermione had no trouble believing that.

She bent back to her scrubbing, squinting in the rapidly fading light. She could see Malfoy out of the corner of her eye, and she couldn’t not watch him. She’d understood him once, before everything, when he was a spoiled child desperately jealous of Harry, believing everything his father told him. She’d understood his every snide word, and it had satisfied her deeply to know this mastery over him. But since the end of the war, since his sudden, unexplained disappearance and the two years doing who knew what on the continent, since he had reappeared in Britain with neither fanfare nor explanation, since the invitation to share his home and use it for her project, she could simply not fathom why he did what he did, let alone what he was thinking at any given moment. It upset her and made her jumpy.

“You cleaned the chandelier,” he said suddenly.

Hermione straightened up again, then stood. It was even more uncomfortable speaking to him from the floor when he was only a few steps away.

“The elves helped me,” she said, glancing up at the vague shape of the enormous, jeweled fixture. “They floated me and themselves up there and we all cleaned it together.”

“How very symbolic,” Draco said dryly.

Hermione scowled. It had been symbolic, and it was extremely frustrating that no one but her, and now him, had gotten it. Even Harry had only smiled indulgently and told her it was a good idea. It had given a few of the more recently freed elves nervous fits, and in the end it’d been almost more trouble than it was worth. Thus her afternoon of toil over the foyer floor, hoping a curious elf or two would see her. It was only the latest in a long line of ideas she’d tried, and Hermione’s initial enthusiasm for her strange sort of rehabilitation center was beginning to flag. She would have to face the possibility very soon, she knew, that there was more here than conditioning and the long, communal memory of fear.

“Well, enjoy your evening,” Draco said, lowering his gaze from the chandelier.

“Are you going out?” Hermione asked.

“Yes.” He turned and headed for the small closet where they kept their cloaks. “I’ve got some errands to run.”

And just like that he was gone, ducking out the front doors and closing them behind him, cutting off the brief slice of brighter light. Hermione stared after him, sighed, and turned back to the mosaic. She considered just leaving it, for her knees and her back were aching, but she only had a little more to do, anyway. She fingered her wand a moment, but there was something appealing in finishing as she had started, in prizing the dirt and grime out with her own fingers. Every single surface of the house had been filthy, she remembered, sinking to her knees again. But the foyer had been particularly bad, the once beautiful floor and furniture and chandelier battered by two full seasonal cycles, howling and thundering and snowing through the doors, abandoned half-open.

She returned to work, and she no longer worried whether there was an elf watching her, whether she was teaching them something or whether their fear would ever abate.

It was full dark by the time she finished. The mosaic gleamed lowly in the light of the single lit torch on the newel post. She was oddly reluctant to charm any other lights, and the foyer was even bigger in the single, meager pool of illumination. It was cleaner now, though, and accomplishing that simple task gave Hermione a visceral sense of satisfaction. She wondered if this was how the elves felt, sometimes.

She put her cleaning supplies away in the kitchen. It was ridiculous, really, she thought not for the first time, this house. She sometimes felt it would be better to measure the corridors in kilometers, rather than steps. The kitchen was oddly empty, not even a hint of elf. Shrugging it off, Hermione headed upstairs to her and Harry’s suite. There was a hot shower with her name on it.

A single lamp was burning in their bedroom. Harry lay on his stomach on top of the covers, shoes and glasses discarded, his face slack in sleep. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and jeans, what they both still thought of as default, stay-at-home clothing, and she could see the rhythm of his breathing in the line of his back. Hermione paused in the doorway, struck by her love for him.

She stepped into the room and shut the door softly behind her. A strange gesture in this monster of a house where the only other human occupant was out, and never came this way, anyhow. Dismissing the thought, Hermione undressed and pulled the tie out of her hair.

She paused on the way to the bathroom to kiss Harry’s cheek. This close to him she could see the shadows of fatigue beneath his eyes. He was still so tired, always tired, even long after he was supposed to have entirely healed from that final, crippling exchange of spells. He was healed, she knew that, but she imagined sometimes that the marks on his face were the long-cast shadows of the many gravestones in a secluded patch at Hogwarts, where moss was only now beginning to grow. She kissed him again there, on the bone just beneath his eye, then the lid itself. The lash flickered, and she retreated quickly so as not to wake him.

The shower was blissful. Hermione stood, hands braced on the marble wall, back to the spray, letting it pound the tension out of her neck and shoulders. She watched the water swirling away between her feet, and wondered just how much of the filth caking this house she had washed off her body in the past six weeks.

She stood naked before the vanity after she was done. The elegant, guilt-framed mirror was steamed up, and her body was a vague impression, woman in the mists. Her hair was longer now, most of the way down her back, and its wet weight lay heavy over her shoulders. She considered a drying spell for a moment, but opted not to. Instead she reached for a thick-toothed comb and set into it the old fashioned way. The snarled curls smoothed beneath her fingers, first along the crown of her head, then farther and farther down until the ends were springy and ordered between her fingers. She kept on combing though, oddly mesmerized by the slowly resolving picture of herself in the clearing glass. The mirrors in Malfoy Manor didn’t talk, or at least she’d never found one that did. This pleased her, for she had always been a little unnerved by the intrusion of another presence, a talking presence, in moments of the most literal self-reflection.

There was a rapping at the door. Hermione dropped the comb and grabbed Harry’s robe off the hook. Harry himself wouldn’t have knocked, and even if he had it wouldn’t have been nearly so timid.

“Miss Hermione,” Dobby squeaked when she opened the door. “Miss Hermione, Flippy is being upset, Miss Hermione.”

“Is upset,” Hermione corrected automatically. Even as she did so she was caught short by it. Of all the elves, as in everything else, Dobby was the most studious of his speech, the most earnestly eager for the respect and notice proper grammar might someday begin to afford him. For Dobby to be forgetting himself and slipping back into traditional elfspeak… “How upset?” she asked. She glanced at Harry, but he was unmoved.

Dobby’s eyes were even larger and rounder than usual, and Hermione imagined the flattened look of his face was the elf equivalent of great distress. “She is not stopping crying,” Dobby whispered, his squeak nearly incomprehensible in his attempt to keep his voice down.

“Come on.” Hermione ducked out the door and headed up the corridor. Flippy was one of the most recent arrivals, refugee of the disintegrating Zabini family. Harry had made a dry comment about the aptness of his name after the chandelier cleaning incident, and though Hermione had glared, she had to agree silently.

She’d chosen the rooms given to the elves with great deliberation. On the third floor, a guest suite of lavish proportions, both physically and atmospherically as far from the kitchens as it was possible to be. The location made even Dobby twitch uncomfortably, and most elves, upon arriving, gasped in horror at the very idea of using such accommodations.

She could hear Flippy two corridors away. Hermione picked up her pace, casting Dobby an alarmed look. She’d heard house elves cry before, of course. There had been Winky, years ago, and in the past six weeks alone Hermione had sat close to more trembling, hysterical creatures than she cared to count. But she had never heard one screaming before, not like this.

Flippy was lying on his back in the middle of the sitting room floor. Winky knelt beside him, her hands fluttering uncertainly over him as she crooned soothing nonsense that did not seem to even register. A frightened ring of elf faces turned up as Hermione and Dobby entered, and the universal look of relief was warming and daunting all at once. They wanted her to fix it, all of them, because she was human and the closest thing to a master they had now.

Flippy was almost writhing with the fury of his crying. He wasn’t just sobbing, Hermione realized as she dropped to her knees next to him, he was in the middle of a full-blown melt-down, what her mother would call a fit. She swallowed the reflexive jolt of sadness the thought provoked and focused her attention on the moment.

“Flippy,” she said firmly. “Flippy, you need to calm down now. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

He cast her a single, despairing look. “Flippy hates you,” he shrieked, the words garbled through the crying and gasping. “Flippy hates you, hates you.”

“I know,” she said, trying to be soothing. “I know you don’t want to be here, and I know you hate me for what I’m making you do.” She inched closer, but she knew better than to try and touch him. Physical comfort was something even Dobby was utterly unequipped to cope with.

Flippy banged his feet on the floor, and Hermione was grateful for the deep pile of the carpeting. The elf tossed his head and gasped. His ears were rolled in tight against his skull, and he squeezed his eyes painfully closed, shutting her out. “Flippy hates it here,” he moaned, “Flippy wants to go home.”

“I know,” Hermione said, almost shouting to be heard. “But you can’t.”

“Master,” Flippy called desperately. “Master!”

Hermione froze a moment, her body going cold. She hadn’t wanted to think it, had dismissed the very idea each time it had crept into her mind. But it was unavoidable now in the face of Flippy’s anguish. She wondered about generations of house elves living in the homes of pure blood families. She wondered where the race had come from, whether its inception had even been the result of natural evolution. She wondered if, in her attempts to save them, to free them, she was driving them mad, pushing their minds until they shattered under the pressure of her will, and the ancient, unbeatable magic living in their very bones demanding that they serve. She’d wanted to help them, wanted to teach them, wanted to set their small, four-toed feet on the road to freedom and give them the tools they would need to walk the whole journey. And now she wasn’t sure they could even see the road at all.

“Master!” Flippy kept calling, begging. “Master!” He rolled suddenly, his ears unfurling as he did, and began beating his fists into the carpet. “I want Master!” he screamed.

Hermione’s heart tripped madly in her chest. She glanced at Dobby, whose gaze was fastened on Flippy with a combination of awe and horror. He took a step forward, then another, dropping to his knees next to Flippy and taking him by the shoulders.

There was little Hermione could do but wait it out. She kept talking, even though she was pretty sure Flippy wasn’t hearing a word. Dobby crouched over him, rubbing his shoulders and controlling the worst of his flailing. It took a long time for Flippy to drain himself to the point of utter exhaustion, and Hermione’s voice was hoarse by the time he lay still, utterly wrung out.

Dobby made a quick sign at a few of the still hovering elves, and they approached cautiously. Dobby gave them quiet instructions, and Hermione marveled again at him, at how different he was. She didn’t care if he had the greatest will, the greatest mind of any house elf, or if he was simply a genetic or a magical abnormality. He was precious beyond words simply by being who he was.

Flippy was carried out of the sitting room by a small group of elves. Dobby crouched a moment longer before straightening up and turning to Hermione. They regarded each other for a long moment, and she was struck by Dobby’s stillness. House elves weren’t, as a general rule, good at being solemn. He’d heard it too, then.

“You look very tired,” he said, enunciating carefully and taking his time.

She smiled her appreciation. “I am,” she agreed. “And I’m also hungry. Would you like to come to the kitchen and get something to eat with me?”

He shook his head, his ears swaying. “I should stay,” he said, glancing towards the inner room where Flippy lay.

“Okay,” Hermione said, climbing laboriously to her feet. “But you can come and find me anytime if you have anything you want to talk about.”

Dobby nodded, and Hermione left for the kitchen.

She stood at the center island, munching a rapidly assembled sandwich and drinking milk. She couldn’t decide whether to despair or celebrate, and from the looks of him, Dobby couldn’t either. They didn’t know whether Flippy would wake up himself, or whether he had been destroyed. And by what? A world collapsing around him? A spell buried so deep in his blood she had no hope of ever getting it out?

“I want my Master,” he had said.

Hermione smiled, finally. She’d never heard a house elf aside from Dobby speak in the first person before. She’d never heard even Dobby utter the powerful, “I want.”

She rinsed her glass and washed her hands. It was full night by now, and she was very tired. The grand luxury of the bed upstairs beckoned, it and the perhaps grander luxury of Harry breathing beside her.

She took the long way around, through the foyer. She paused a moment at the bottom of the grand staircase, struck again by the sheer scope of the room. Folly, she thought, beginning to climb, folly and vanity and pointlessness.

There were no windows at the top of the stairs, and the torch from below gave only a vague, unhelpful glow. Hermione was just reaching for her wand when a shadow detached itself from the rail overlooking the foyer. She jumped, swallowed a squeak, and lit her wand as not to repeat her earlier mistake. But it really was Harry this time, and she found the smile she had saved for him.

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

He smiled back and wrapped both arms around her. “Did I dream Dobby stealing you away?”

She sighed, and pressed her face into his shoulder. Sleep still clung to him somehow, palpable in the warmth coming off him and the scent of his skin. “We had a problem with Flippy,” she said. “He, well…”

“Flipped?” Harry suggested when she hesitated. He slid a hand from the small of her back up her spine to her neck and began to knead.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said suddenly, lifting her head from the haven of his neck. “I don’t know how to help him. No one’s ever even thought about doing this before, and there’s a chance it’s not even possible.” Her wand was still lit, tilted at a careless angle in the hand holding his shoulder. By the strange, slanted light, she could see his face, know that this was no surprise to him.

“You’re not going to give up,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” she said instantly. “Of course not. I just wish I knew what I was doing.”

“Sorry I slept through it all,” he said. “And the mosaic, too, I know I was supposed to help with that.”

“No, no.” She touched his cheek, but a reflexive scowl was already forming on his face to the words she hadn’t even said yet. “You were tired. You need to rest.”

“I don’t need to, though,” he said, not withdrawing from her hand, but not leaning into it, either.

“Harry—“

“No. I’m fine. I don’t need to be coddled like one of your house elves.” The words were sharp, sharper than expected, than warranted.

“You think I’m coddling them?” she asked, taking a step back. “You think trying to reverse the legacy of centuries, of millennia of slavery is coddling them?”

His scowl fell away and he rocked forward on his toes. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, yes you did.” Hermione felt her body shift, felt herself squaring off against him. “You haven’t been exactly supportive of this whole thing from the beginning, and I was never sure why. You don’t think it’s worth it, do you? You don’t know why I’m bothering with a bunch of house elves.”

“Hermione—“

“No.” She stopped him with a sharp gesture, her wand cutting an angry slash of light through the darkness. “I don’t understand you. First you tell me you think it’s grand, that you’ll help me, and then all of a sudden once we’re here, you’re not anymore.” She stopped suddenly, struck by a thought. “Harry, is it this house? Is it bothering you to be here?”

He looked away, and she took the step back to him without thought. “It’s not what you think,” he said, gazing off into the darkness of the foyer.

She touched his hand and he unclenched it from a tense ball. “Maybe we should leave,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t crazy about living here in the first place. It was just the space for the elves and us and everything and sort of…symbolic. We still don’t know why Draco even asked.”

He laughed a little. “You still insist on calling him Draco, then?”

“It’s only proper,” she said, letting him deflect her for the moment. “We are living in the same house.”

“Admit it. You only do it because you know he hates it.”

“Well…”

“I do think it’s grand,” he said, meeting her eyes. “I think what you’re doing is so important, and you’re amazing for even thinking of it.”

She sighed, and unknotted a little because yes, that mattered very much. “Is it the house?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes and no and I’m just not sure.” He reached for her, and she slipped into his arms as a matter of course. Peace should be easier, she thought, wrapping both arms around him tight. War was awful and dirty and bloody, and peace was awful and dirty and bloodless. Harry was still tired, she knew. She could feel it under her hands as she squeezed his shoulders. Harry was always tired, and Flippy’s screams still rang in her ears.

“Am I coddling the elves?” she asked. “I mean, we’re not desperate here. It’s not like with Winky. I don’t need to be that hard on them.”

“It worked on her, didn’t it?” Harry asked gently.

Hermione sighed. It had worked, in the end. Given the choice, Winky had stood tall and lifted her head and faced the enormity of a life and a freedom stolen from her and her people, and she’d gone against everything she had ever learned to give them the information about her old master they’d so desperately needed. But they weren’t at war now. They had time to be careful, to be kind, to break through the barriers slowly. But Flippy hadn’t been slow, hadn’t been careful, had not been kind, and she was still teetering on the knife edge of despair and triumph with him.

“I want,” she started, then stopped, because she didn’t know how to finish the sentence, she didn’t know what she wanted.

“What?”

Harry’s breath was on her cheek and she was suddenly, intimately aware that she was not wearing panties under the robe that smelled of him. “I want—“ she started again.

But Harry was already moving, Harry already knew somehow. He kissed her hard, his tongue insistent in her mouth, his hands suddenly eager at the belt of the robe. Hermione thought of protesting, of pulling away and insisting they return to their rooms, but the truth was she didn’t want to. And then the robe was open and Harry was pushing it off her shoulders, and she was standing naked in the dimness with Harry’s mouth on hers and his hands on her breasts.

She kissed him back, gripped his hair, held his shoulders and then his waist. He was somehow bigger in the darkness, taller and broader than he would be normally, and the change was an intense, visceral jolt low in her belly.

He released her and she touched her lips reflexively, feeling their tenderness. He took her by the upper arms and turned her to the left and pushed. Hermione took a reflexive step, and was just about to protest when her hands found the cool stone of the landing balustrade. She gripped it hard, spreading her arms out to her sides a little, bending slightly at the waist as Harry moved up close behind her.

He kissed her neck and lifted her still wet hair aside to mouth her spine. One hand held her waist and the other walked down her back, cupped a buttock and squeezed possessively, then slipped between her legs. Hermione sighed and leaned farther forward.

And suddenly she felt suspended, as he slipped his fingers inside her. She was hanging over the foyer, the vast space palpable below her, held only by the balustrade and Harry’s fingers at her nipple and working inside her. She cried out softly, tossing her head to free her face of clinging hair. Harry’s fingers moved in her hard, fast, and he twisted his hand so he could press at her clit. She gasped raggedly, grounded only by his hands, by the way he was touching her only enough to make her feel like this, and no more. The world seemed to tilt, and she gripped the railing harder, leaning over it, feeling Harry shift behind her.

“Lumos,” he said, and the chandelier blazed to life.

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them. The chandelier wasn’t far above her, and the whole room seemed impossibly bright. She caught a glimpse of the imposing doors, a flash of color from the newly cleaned mosaic, an impression of the impossibly arched ceiling. Then Harry was moving again, pressing closer this time, and Hermione threw her head back as he entered her with one long thrust.

He fucked her hard there, over the balustrade, with the lights blazing all around them and the vast room echoing with their sounds. Hermione did little, wanted to do nothing, but hold on and let him. His hands slid up and down her body, cupping her breasts, fingering her nipples, taking handfuls of her hair, touching her face. They’d made love like this before, of course, with her back to him, but there was something in this, in the space spreading out all around them, in the almost painful lights, that made it wilder, deeper. Hermione leaned over the balustrade as far as she could and clenched hard around his cock. She pressed back at him with little twists of the hip, and cried out a bit louder every time a hand wandered down to pinch her clit.

Her vision went hazy before she came, and she let her head droop. Harry wrapped both arms tight around her, leaning over to press his chest to her back. He sped up, his breaths coming in quick, staccato bursts in her ear.

Hermione came hard on him, and she screamed when she did. He held her tight through it, still thrusting frantically, and the echo of her voice in the foyer mirrored the shudders in her body. She felt naked everywhere, more bare than she had ever felt before in her life. There was just air around her, just this vast space and the blazing lights, and her mouth was open for her scream and her thighs were open for Harry and she felt something pass from her, something old and frightened and angry and grieving and trapped. It passed out of her and she breathed in a great lungful of air, feeling Harry speed up even more, and she opened her eyes…

...and looked straight down at Draco Malfoy, standing in the middle of the mosaic, watching them.

She clenched all over, and Harry came.

Draco turned away, and Hermione felt a sudden, keen stab of sympathy for him. Because she’d figured it out in that moment, with her body and her eyes wide open. She knew why they were here, why he had asked them, why he avoided them so carefully. She felt sorry for him, thinking he would retreat into the drawing room, pretend he’d never seen.

But then he was at the stairs, and coming up them fast.

Hermione gasped and straightened, and she was never sure, but she thought it was only then Harry realized what was happening. He jumped and his arms nearly crushed her, and the lewdness of it, the way he was still half-hard inside her made her flush all over.

“Well,” Draco said, arriving at the landing. “Isn’t this interesting. Didn’t know you two had it in you.”

Hermione was twisted sideways between Harry and the balustrade, her body sheened with sweat. Harry was actually still wearing his T-shirt, she noticed for the first time.

“Was a bit careless of you not to mind your elves though, Granger,” he continued casually. “I had to send the head revolutionary himself away before he got an eyeful. He was coming to tell you that someone named Nippy is awake and fine, by the way.”

“Flippy,” Hermione said automatically, then flushed more.

Draco’s eyebrow shot up. “Seriously?” he said. “They seriously named—“

“Did you want something?” Harry said abruptly.

Hermione turned her head and looked at his face. He knew, she understood as she saw the way he flushed when he’d realized what he’d said. He knew, and he’d probably known all along. It explained a whole hell of a lot.

“Yeah,” Draco said. “Yeah, I do.”

“But you don’t share well,” Hermione said, looking straight at him. He returned her gaze for the first time since she’d seen him there on the floor below them, face upturned as if for benediction. He had not looked at her then, at the spectacle of naked woman and wild hair draped over ancient stone. He’d been staring, transfixed, over her shoulder at Harry.

“No,” Draco said. “I don’t. I’m really crap at it, actually. But, well.” He shrugged, and the gesture was oddly eloquent.

Hermione stared at him for a long time. Harry was utterly still behind her, a blank of emotion and input. She wondered how long he’d been sure. Before they’d moved in here? She rather thought so. Yes, it explained a whole hell of a lot.

“I don’t either,” she said to Draco.

He nodded, as if utterly unsurprised, and took a half-step backwards. “You’ll want to be leaving then,” he said.

“No,” Hermione said, feeling Harry twitch behind her. “No, I don’t think we will.”

“If you think you’re welcome here simply because it’s convenient for you, you’re mistaken,” Draco snapped, showing real upset for the first time. “I have no intention of hosting your little school if there’s nothing in it for me.” The words were callous, but the desolation in his eyes stung worse.

“There’s a lot in it for you,” she said. “For all of us.”

He blinked at her, and his face was utterly, inscrutably still for a moment. “What are you saying, Granger?” he asked finally.

“I’m saying,” she said deliberately, “that it’s really about time you started calling me Hermione and Harry Harry, don’t you think?”

She glanced up at Harry, who was watching them with wide, frightened eyes. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then shut it, shaking his head a little. He looked as if he had been expecting a Cruciatus curse, and had instead been embraced.

“Well,” she said into the silence. “I need to go check on Flippy.” She turned in Harry’s arms and kissed his cheek. Then she disentangled herself and stepped away from him, careful not to look conscious of her nudity as she crossed the landing to pick up her robe. Behind her, she knew they stood silently, not looking at her or each other.

Hermione turned up the corridor towards the third floor. “Don’t wait up for me, you two,” she threw nonchalantly over her shoulder, with a flip tone that was at once old and unfamiliar on her tongue. “Flippy and I need to talk, I think.”


End file.
